This exchange takes place in a conversation between Ken and translator Bill Porter (nom de plume Red Pine, known for his translations of the Diamond Sutra, the Heart Sutra, and many other classical texts). A student asks: “Where do Buddhism and politics meet?”
This burning question has been coming up again and again in recent conversations I've had with other practitioners. How do we live in a world that feels increasingly unstable without retreating into personal practice or collapsing into outrage and despair?
Before the political question is raised, Ken tells the story of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. Having vowed never to fall into despair, Avalokiteshvara works for eons for the welfare of beings. When he pauses to assess the results and sees that suffering has not diminished, his head shatters. What eventually sinks in from this story, Ken says, is that true compassion goes beyond despair. It is not concerned with achieving some final end state, but meets what is arising now, without attachment to outcome.
Bill’s response is direct: "You can’t do anything more political than be aware of your own experience." Any benefit to society flows from that.
Ken then draws a careful distinction between ideology and practice. Institutions and groups fight for survival and may even use religious language to justify themselves, but this is very different from the work of transforming one’s own experience. That distinction feels crucial. It may be tempting either to condemn distorted forms of religion or to try to fix the world through righteous certainty, but the story of Avalokiteshvara reframes the terrain. If we expect compassion to result in visible change in human affairs, despair seems inevitable. If we want others to conform to our vision, we risk adding one more rigid position to an already fractured field.
We would like the world to make sense, but today’s world often feels like madness. It's easy to forget that periods of peace have arisen throughout history, only to end when power and dissatisfaction tear them apart. The bodhisattva vow is clear about not succumbing to despair, but the price of sanity is to be deeply aware of the pain of the world.
The message I take from this rich exchange between a student, Bill and Ken is that a practitioner’s path is neither withdrawal nor indifference, but the discipline of remaining present, with very clear eyes, in a world that does not make sense. From there, whatever action arises may not fix or resolve a situation, but it need not deepen the madness. Perhaps that is where practice and politics meet: in the bodhisattva’s commitment not to let despair fracture the mind.
From Anything Is Possible 2 (AP02)
Ken: There’s a story or a myth associated with Avalokiteshvara our hero of the Heart Sutra. Now, as many of you probably know, Avalokiteshvara is the bodhisattva who is the embodiment of awakened compassion. And the story is told that when he was a student of Buddha Amitabha, who was his guru, he took the bodhisattva vow, and as his personal expression of the bodhisattva vow, he vowed that if he should ever fall into a state of despair, his head would burst into 1,000 pieces.
So with this very strong motivation, he started working for the welfare of beings. Whenever I say this now I’m mindful of Bill’s translation of the Diamond Sutra saying a bodhisattva who conceives of sentient beings is not a bodhisattva. Still working on that one. So for three incalculably long eons, he works for the welfare of sentient beings. And then he stops to take a break and see how he’s doing. He’s still attached to the idea of progress you see. And he looks, and he sees that there are more sentient beings suffering in samsara than when he started, that they’re suffering from poverty, and that their reactive emotions are stronger than before.
And he says, "What’s the use?" And his head burst into 1,000 pieces. Amitabha appears on the scene says, "Hmm, you broke your vow. Now you’re going to have to come up with a new one." And he heals him, and then the story says that the 1,000 pieces of his head became the 1,000 arms of one of the forms of Avalokiteshvara. And as he formulated his new vow, he saw that sentient beings needed help fast, they needed help with reactive emotions, they needed help with poverty. So this black hung, the letter hung, appeared in his heart and became what is now known as the six-armed Mahakala, which is the wrathful emanation of compassion.
And I’ve heard this story many, many times. My teacher Kalu Rinpoche told it many times when I was translating. And over the years, it gradually sunk into me that one way to understand the story is that true compassion goes beyond despair. And so it’s not concerned with achieving or arriving at some kind of end state. It is meeting what is arising in terms of suffering or struggle in the present moment with no attachment to a goal or an end state that will one day be reached. And that story then became very, very powerful for me.
Student: Yeah. This is related. I’ve just spent about a year and a half in Sri Lanka. And I know you’re aware of the situation there, but where does Buddhism and politics come together? Because it was very confusing to me to be there and listen to the way the Buddhists talked about the Tamil Tigers. The head monk would actually get on the TV and say, "We have to kill them all." And I was just struck by that, but how does one be political in a larger sense outside of being aware of one’s own experience?
Bill: Well, you can’t do anything more political than be aware of your own experience. And any benefit—if you want to look at it as an external benefit to your society—won’t come about without that awareness. Somebody once asked Confucius about the same situation. And he said, if you want to bring peace to your country, you have to bring peace to your state. And if you want to bring peace to your state, you have to bring peace to your village. And if you want to bring peace to your village, you have to bring peace to your family. And if you want to bring peace to your family, you have to bring peace to yourself. And so any Buddhist political program can’t go beyond dealing with your own experience, and in transforming that experience to compassion, to what Ken was talking about in terms of what Avalokiteshvara does.
One can criticize other Buddhists as being, "Well, you’re just not a real Buddhist," but that’s doomed to create more disharmony in the world—that sort of attitude. Maybe it’s just the way I approach things, but I like what Confucius said. I work on myself. I figure the better person I am, well, my family, my community, my country will be benefited that way, not by me getting on a soap box and criticizing those people and supporting those people and creating more division.
Ken: It’s a complex and difficult question. Buddhism as it was originally developed was not terribly concerned with politics. It was concerned with individual freedom. Nevertheless, in the time of Buddha he found himself involved in a lot of political situations.
There’s a set of recordings on dharmaseed.org which is a very good website. It’s got a lot of recordings from various, mainly Theravadan teachers. One of them is Stephen Bachelor, who some of you may know, and he does a series of lectures on the life of Buddha in which he completely demythologizes the life of Buddha. He makes use of a concordance that a Theravadan monk did of the Pali Canon earlier in the 20th century, and is able to reconstruct with some precision, the political machinations that were going on in the life of Buddha.
It’s very, very instructive. And at one point Buddha’s cousin, Devadatta, and the son of one of the kings got together and said, “Well, you knock off Buddha, and I knock off the old king and we can take over the whole thing. You become the spiritual leader, and I become the temporal leader.”
Now this plot actually didn’t work. Devadatta didn’t succeed in knocking off Buddha, though he did try, but the young king did manage to succeed in killing his father, or at least imprisoning him—I can’t remember precisely. So even though, Buddha had little interest in politics, he found himself embroiled in these situations.
And fast-forward a couple of thousand years to the Second World War in which we find the Japanese regarding themselves as the instruments of karma and inflicting a great deal of suffering on China and other countries, figuring they were just cleaning the world up. And this, to my mind, is equally as specious a justification as we had in the Crusades when Christians regard themselves as acting on the will of God. I think we have to, at least for me, distinguish between that kind of ideology or ideological position from what Buddhism is talking about as practice. What you’re talking about in terms of those ideologies is how various institutions and various groups of people are fighting for their survival one way or another, which is a very, very different matter. And they will use Buddhist formulations or Christian formulations or Islamic formulations, whatever, to justify, but this doesn’t mean that what they’re doing is actually the practice of the religion. And so I think one has to approach this very sensitively, but also with very, very clear eyes.